Let me first start off by saying that I have been using this product for about 20 years now. I started with their most involved set when I owned my own business and had stock investments and have been gradually working my way down as I have worked my way into retirement. I now have a fairly simple tax return and so the Deluxe version works well for me now. Since I live in a state with no income tax, this version which is a Federal return version only works great for me.

I have been using either Norton or McAfee for several years and have had various degrees of success with each. I was always irritated that I had to buy so many copies just because I have multiple computers in the house. This set sort of solved that in that it would protect 3 PCs, but technically, only one person could ever use any of the computers. If you have a family, you know that is not how life is.

I’m a fan of QuickBooks Pro, it’s a great piece of software for managing a small business, a sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC or small corporation: however, 2012 was nothing wonderful: some of the updates were great, I had a lot of trouble loading it on my (old) laptop, even though it met minimum specs (say what?!), and all the features they take away now and want you to pay for, like emailing pdf invoices: now it’s subscription service rather than free…they also made that change to older versions of Quick Books, but really…great software, but Intuit seems to be a just a little off their game on this one.

I wanted some quick and easy software to create a legal will for myself (you know, just in case, always a good idea ‘they’ say), and this software does just that! In about the space of 45 minutes, I had created a great customized will for myself, including leaving multiple specific bequests: the software is super easy, with templates already installed, and you run through the prompts and answer the questions to produce a will: great product, would definitely recommend!

PDF Create 7 does exactly that - creates pdfs. It’s not fancy, it doesn’t let you edit pdf’s or create editable pdf’s, but what it does, is makes pdf’s from your files…it’s fast, it’s easy - good software. There are other pdf creating software options out there, and this one is not more or less than others - it’s just good pdf creating software - it’s useful and good…I like it :)…

Yeah, so I’m really not too big of a fan of this photo-editing software - being a long-time user of Adobe Photoshop (7.0 mostly), I thought I’d give this Corel PaintShop Photo Pro a try…I just wasn’t that impressed. It’s not as intuitive or well laid out as Photoshop: the photo locator (finding photo files) is annoying and took forever. I liked the fact that you can work with RAW files, but I just was not excited about this software.

Well, I’ve been using QuickBooks 2007 for my small business, and am a fan of that product: 2007 retail version, and it works quite well! I was quite excited to get an opportunity to review QuickBooks Pro 2011 - a great chance to upgrade and use all the new features! But I could never get the installation to work successfully. I will say I did have QUITE a bit of trouble with this installation: QuickBooks 2011 did not want to install on my computer at all: I am running Windows XP on a 5 year old laptop with plenty of memory and RAM (and incidentally, meets all the minimum requirements listed on the box).

Norton Internet Security for MAC - a great product, IF you needed it for a Mac, which you really don’t. MACs are pretty solid without, and this product seems to be more unnecessary than necessary. and Slows the MAC down, so totally think it’s not needed. Meh.

Corel Painter 12 is nice, I will admit - as a long time Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator user, Corel Painter was an adjustment. There were some key differences between the two programs that makes Corel a great piece of software, but I also must admit my machine may not be quite up to handling it….it’s a decent laptop, but over 5 years old, and Painter not only took a bit to launch, but was also slow to run at times: honestly I think that was more my computer than Corel Painter 12, but I did meet the mimimum specs, so just wanted to throw that out there.

I own a prior NAS from QNAP (a TS409 purchased about 2 years ago). I have had little to no problems with the NAS device, and when I did have 1 problem updating the firmware, QNAP tech support was top notch. They remoted into my NAS and fixed the issue. When I decided to purchase another NAS device (extra speed, more storage), I could not find a better product than this QNAP.